[fitsbits] Start of the 'INHERIT' Public Comment Period

[Thierry Forveille]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2007, Archie Warnock wrote:
> William Pence <pence at milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in
> news:mailman.11.1175867088.4349.fitsbits at listmgr.cv.nrao.edu:
>
>> Some might suggest that with the abundance of low cost disk space that
>> is now available, the inherit convention is trying to fix a
>> non-problem.  The amount of diskspace that is saved by not duplicating
>> the keywords in every extension is rather insignificant in most cases
>> and doesn't warrant the extra software complexity in supporting the
>
> No, but avoiding potential errors by not duplicating text strings is a
> worthy effort, as we learned long ago from relational database theory.
>
Well, if one really cares about such consistency, using multiple
image extensions doesn't sound like a very good base. One single
binary table maps a lot better to a data base than multiple image
extensions that may or may not duplicate header information.

I have (perhaps incorrect?) memories that the image extension was
sold to the FITS community on the basis of being easier to use
for simple cases than rows within a binary table (I was never
quite convinced by that argument, but didn't really voice those
concerns...). It seems that its use has grown beyond simple cases
and that its limitations now bite. I know I am being a bit 
provocative here, but would it perhaps be time to consider
deprecating the IMAGE extension??